U.S. users spent 121 billion minutes on social media in July 2012

Social networks continued their domination of our lives in 2012 with U.S. users logging more than 121 billion minutes across numerous social networks in just July of this year.

Put another way, that’s more than 2 billion hours of viewing vacation photos and reading about a friend’s new puppy.

That’s up 36% from 88.4 billion minutes spent on social media in July 2011, according to Nielsen’s recently released 2012 social media report.

Facebook alone accounts for a major portion of that time. U.S. users spent more than 62 billion minutes on Facebook on their computers alone -- up 23% from last year. That accounted for 17% of the total time spent on our computers.

QUIZ: What set the Internet on fire in 2012?

Throw in Facebook’s mobile site and apps, and we actually spent 93.3 billion minutes on the Menlo Park, Calif.,-based social network.

But Facebook wasn’t the only social network to post impressive numbers.

Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and Pinterest each saw their computer and mobile app unique U.S. visitors grow whopping percentages. The most notable growth belonged to Pinterest, which exploded exponentially and increased its computer audience by more than 1,000% and its mobile app audience by nearly 1,700%.

Mobile social media activity also made large gains this past year.

According to the report, we now spend a third of our social media time on mobile apps, and the amount of time we now spend on social apps grew by 76% from last year.

Other notable highlights for the report, which you can see in detail here, include these tidbits:

• More than half of adults ages 25 through 34 use social media at work. That’s higher than any other age group.
• One-third of young adults ages 18 through 24 use social networks even when they go to the bathroom.
• One-third of social media users prefer customer care over social networks than over the phone. Most social network users, 29%, post on companies’ Facebook pages.
• Social network ads are working the most on Asian consumers, who are far more likely to share ads, like ads and purchase products than other demographics. Social ads work the least on white consumers.

[For the record, 2:48 p.m. Dec. 7: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said these figures were for all of 2012. They are for only July 2012.]

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